Today's Dog Bites Man Story

IAEA and Foreign Policy's Eric Hundman cast some skepticism on some of the latest anti-Iran agitprop. The Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb waxes indignant. But Goldfarb is using selective quotation and bad "fact".

Comments

"When asked why it would have information that has "no value outside of a nuclear weapons program," Iran responded that it received them inadvertently while purchasing its nuclear equipment on the black market decades ago."

Everyone knows that blueprints for a nuclear bomb are always tossed in when purchasing uranium enrichment technology on the black market. It's like getting a free game when you buy an x-box.

And let be serious, Iran didn't admit to having the full plans for a bomb only part of the plans for a bomb.

I think we can safely assume thats all they have and anyone who says different is a neo-con war monger.

Posted by Dave | November 16, 2007 1:15 PM

Where Hundman gets it wrong is in complaining that Iran "withheld" the document for two years.

Well, no, it didn't. It showed the document to the IAEA and let the IAEA seal it. What they didn't let the IAEA do is take it out of the country until now.

Now it's hardly unlikely that they don't have copies. What they didn't want the IAEA to do is fully analyze it and possibly come up with information compromising some of their contacts in the Pakistan (or other) nuclear engineering community from which they got this and other documents.

Or as Hundman put it, possibly correctly, they withheld it as a bargaining chip for later.

Either way, this merely means that somebody in the Iranian system wanted this document. This should come as no surprise. Any military in the world seeing this document or hearing of its existence would want it. It's no surprise to me that the Iranian military would wish as much detailed information on nuclear weapons as possible. Every military in the world - with the possible exception of the island of Nauru - would want the same.

None of that means that the Iranian military or Iran in general has a "nuclear weapons PROGRAM" in which they are actively pursuing the development of nuclear weapons.

Collecting the available technological documentation on nuclear weapons is something to be expected - especially when your biggest two enemies have 100-400 nuclear weapons and several thousand respectively.

And I'm sure this is exactly why Iran didn't want anybody to know about it - because it would be assumed that just because they were collecting information on nuclear weapons that they intended to build the weapons themselves.

The bottom line is that they STILL do not have a nuclear weapons program NOW - and no evidence that they actually want one. And even if they did, and even if they pulled out of the NPT NOW, they would still be at least three and probably five to ten years away from actually having anything more than a North Korean "fizzle" weapon - which weapon could not be delivered except by truck - a large truck.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | November 16, 2007 11:12 PM